2013News

Invivienda buries its dead

Hundreds of friends and relatives in tears and expressing complaints against the District Attorney’s office in the province of Santo Domingo, accompanied the caskets to their final resting place. The victims, Yendy, Rosanny Luciano Mendez, Vicky Talia Irrizari Mendez, Sarah Maria Mendez Castillo and tiny Mia Camila Feliz Luciano were all laid to rest next to each other.

Their neighbors and witnesses tell how on 26 December Vicky went to the District Attorney’s Gender Violence Department and filed a complaint against Enmanuel, a man who beat her constantly. Once the complaint was filed, the prosecutor on duty gave her a paper so that the victim herself could take it to the Police. The paper was an order to appear for her killer that says, textually, among other things, “please escort Mr. Enmanuel Lami Roman to appear before this prosecutor’s office on 11 January.” The residents of block 4712 described Vicky as an exemplary mother, devoted to her family and inseparable from her little Mia Camila. And since not even death could separate them, mother and daughter were buried in the same vault in the Cristo Salvador Cemetery, next to her sister and her mother.

With red and swollen eyes from so much crying, her father blamed the prosecutor’s office for the tragedy: “How could the prosecutor give this animal, this beast an appointment for 11 January? The Prosecutor is to blame for this, they ordered my family’s murder,” said don Francisco Sabino.